


Just Like Falling

by Ankhet



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chloe Decker Finds Out, Confessions, F/M, Fix-It, Light Angst, Love Confessions, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Wing Reveal, Not Canon Compliant, Rating May Change, Season 3, and ellipsis, overuse of em dashes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-11 15:04:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20548139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankhet/pseuds/Ankhet
Summary: What if 3x21 (“Anything Pierce Can Do I Can Do Better”) went very differently? What if Chloe rejected Pierce instead of accepting his proposal? And what if maybe, just maybe, she came to him that night instead?





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To anyone new coming in, or people who have this bookmarked, waiting for it to be finished: I'm so sorry, my busy season (in life, in business, in EVERYTHING) hit about three days after I finished Chapter 2. Chapter 3 IS COMING! It might just take a little while. I promise this fic has not been abandoned, I just need to have enough spoons to write the sexy chapter properly.

She doesn’t even know anymore what they were fighting about. Lucifer had been annoying, sure, but he hadn’t been any more Lucifer-y than normal.

But between Dan still being a dick on occasion, Maze being even weirder and pricklier than normal, and Trixie both sad over her favorite babysitter disappearing for a bounty - again - _and_ sick with a cold, and whatever was going on with Marcus, Chloe just snapped at Lucifer, probably over something stupid.

She doesn’t even remember their fight anymore, not really. She knows she pulled him aside after a particularly ill-timed quip while questioning a witness. But thinking back on it now, it really had been no worse a comment than a dozen others she’d let go with no more than an eye roll.

No, what sticks with Chloe is the stunned look on Lucifer’s face when she sharply orders him off the case and orders him home. He’d tried to hide it from her, but the one thing stuck in her mind, now, hours later, is how his eyes had grown sad and his face had fallen as he turned from her, all fight having visibly left the man who was usually the undauntedly gleeful pain in her ass.

Maybe that’s why she finds herself in the elevator at Lux. Or maybe it’s that she doesn’t want to be alone right now, not after Marcus.... Maybe it’s that she finds herself gravitating toward the one man she shouldn’t… the one man who isn’t.. _No._ She stops her line of thinking in its tracks. Thinking is painful right now, so she shies away from thinking about anything too much right now.

* * *

He’d turned away from the scene through the glass. Away from Pierce kneeling down in front of his Detective. He’d walked away, and missed seeing the tears in her eyes as she silently shook her head at Pierce. Missed seeing her flee into her bedroom while Pierce stood up and quietly stormed out.

Now, back at his penthouse, all he wants is to drink himself into oblivion. Sadly, without the Detective nearby… without his Chloe…. Well. Climbing down the mouth of a bottle isn’t as easy as he’d like, now is it?

Funny though, tonight it’s oddly easier than he expected. The sensation is, oddly, comfortingly familiar. It’s just another kind of falling, after all, and he’s very familiar with what falling feels like.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2k words in one chapter, wow!
> 
> Buckle in kids, we're in for a Feels rollercoaster.

Chloe’s looking down at her feet when the elevator stops at Lucifer’s penthouse. She walks forward for only a couple of steps before she sees Lucifer. He looks over at her, drunk and bleary-eyed, confusion clear on his face.

“Detective..? What are you doing here?” He hasn’t been crying, but he damn sure seems like he’d been about to before she’d walked in. “Shouldn’t you be with Pierce, not here?” A self-deprecating smile flirts across his lips as he leans forward to pour more whiskey into his glass.

“Yeah, he uh. He asked me to marry him.” Chloe’s hands fidget slowly in front of her.

“_Oh_, Detective?” the words slither from his tongue. “Why in the _world_ are you here, then? You should be celebrating. Though I’ll note there’s no ring on your finger. Pierce has bad taste in all things but women, I’d wager, and that extends to jewelry as well I’d imagine?” He brings the glass up for another drink.

“I said no.”

Her words freeze Lucifer where he is, hand and glass midair for a moment before he lowers them, sip untaken. “Well. That _is _an interesting development.” He turns to her. “Detective, I must ask… why?”

Chloe lifts one shoulder in an unsure movement. “I…” she looks away and shrugs a little, plays with the cuffs of her jacket. “I don’t know,” she mutters, unable to look directly at him.

Lucifer, drunk though his is, recognizes a falsehood when he sees one. He rises from the couch, walks to her on legs he’s proud to say only wobble a little. “Now that’s a lie if ever I’ve heard one, Detective. And if there’s one thing you know I won’t stand for—”

“—it’s a liar.” She finishes for him. He touches a finger under her chin and she allows him to lift her face to his and meets his eyes.

Chloe summons her courage. “I didn’t really love him. I loved… I don’t know, the idea of him. I liked that he…” she closes her eyes briefly, knowing her next words will hurt Lucifer, “...that he wasn’t you.” She can feel Lucifer still completely. She knows she’s about to lose him. She can’t let that happen. “But that’s the thing,” she rushes on before he can storm away - and before she can lose her nerve, “I didn’t love him _because_ he wasn’t you.”

His finger does drop from her chin now, his head tilting as though contemplating something that hadn’t occurred to him before and his eyes are filled with some kind of hope - the fragile kind of hope of someone almost afraid to hope, afraid to have their heart crushed yet again, afraid to let their walls down and believe….

“Are… are you saying that you—?”

“I don’t know, Lucifer!” Chloe’s hands are wringing together almost of their own accord. She closes her eyes, all but ordering the tears gathering in them not to fall. “I don’t — I — _yes,_ I love you! But.. I can’t _do this_.” She gestures around, gestures to him and the ancient Assyrian wall and everything that makes this space _Lucifer’s_. “This. The, whatever the thing is with you! You have this secret and all this time you still won’t tell me the truth about who you are, or all this insanity with your family, or, or your metaphors or anything!”

Lucifer’s face does a neat trick, almost like origami. In a single motion, the drunken vulnerability shifts into something more closed, more resigned. “I’ve told you, Detective,” he recites to her, the words so familiar they’re almost a litany now. “They’re not metaphors. I always tell you the truth. You refuse to believe me.”

“What, that you’re the Devil? How— Lucifer, _how_ am I supposed to believe that? Even if I believed in any of that — believed in Heaven, and Hell, and a God and, just…

“For fuck’s sake, Lucifer you bleed. I’ve seen you get hurt. I’ve hurt you, I’ve _shot_ you! If you’re ‘The Devil’ shouldn’t you not even be able to get hurt?” Lucifer snorts a little under his breath - not that he’d ever admit it was a snort - at this. “I’ve seen you bleeding on the ground— Amenadiel even told me you survived Malcolm because—”

“I know what he told you,” Lucifer cuts in. “I know what I let you believe. Blood packs and a bulletproof vest. And for that… well. I am sorry I let you believe a lie. I…” he trails off for a moment, his eyes staring through space in regret. “The last person I...showed… well. I think I broke her. Wouldn’t talk to me for weeks.”

Chloe’s mind flashes to a conversation more than a year prior, not long after Lucifer had tried to talk the gunman they were chasing that week into shooting him. Chloe still doesn’t know what happened to Lucifer then. He still won’t talk about it. But this gives her just a little more insight. She remembers telling him to talk to Linda, please. She remembers being frightened for him, worried he might do something even more stupid than he’d just tried. She remembers he’d come to her, upset but trying to hide it with blame, shortly afterwards.

> _“Detective, I’ve a bone to pick with you.”_
> 
> _“Not a good time, Lucifer.”_
> 
> _“Agreed. It’s a horrible time. Dr. Linda just canceled my session. She won’t take my calls. I think I truly scared her off.”_
> 
> _“Something happened with your shrink?”_
> 
> _“Yes. And it’s all your fault. I mean, you’re the one who suggested I open up to her. Well, smashing advice, Detective.”_

She remembers another conversation a few days later, and something clicks this time.

> _“I think I’ve broken my therapist. And now she’s somewhere to the left of totally useless and to the right of babbling lunatic.”_
> 
> _“Oh. So she’s you in a skirt.”_
> 
> _“Very funny. This is serious, Detective. I’m actually a bit worried for her.”_
> 
> _“Hmm. I’m sure she’ll be fine. But if you need anyone to talk to, I’m here.”_
> 
> _“This is actually something I can’t discuss with you.”_
> 
> _“What? I’m sure I can handle it. I’ve seen all your ugly parts by now.”_
> 
> _“Not even close, I’m afraid.”_

“Lucifer…” Chloe starts speaking slowly, almost like she’s talking down an armed opponent. “You won’t scare me off.”

“You can’t promise that, Detective.” His response is nearly inaudible.

“Please, trust me.”

Lucifer hesitates a moment. He resigns himself to this inevitability. “Very well.” He closes his eyes, not wanting to see the horror on Chloe’s face when she realizes the truth. When she realizes what kind of monster he truly is. After a final moment’s hesitation, making up his mind, then—

With a sort of shifting of his shoulders, Lucifer brings forth his wings. Chloe can’t believe what she’s seeing, at first. She remembers the wings at the auction, years ago now, near the beginning of their partnership, but these — they may look similar but these are _real_ and there’s something more real about them than almost anything else she can think of. Slowly, almost, though not entirely, without conscious thought she inches forward, first one foot and then the other.

What’s foremost in her mind is a deluge of memories, this time filtered through the absolute certainty that Lucifer - her partner and her best friend - is absolutely who he says he is: the Devil, the son of God, a fallen angel. But — and her thoughts almost stutter for a moment — he’s _not _‘The Devil’, is he? Not the incarnation of evil and cruelty. He’s not The Devil to her. Not with the acts of kindness and caring towards others he thought she didn’t see but she did. Not with his absolute insistence on justice being carried out. Not with how he treated the innocent. Not with how he was absolutely fixated on punishing evil, not carrying it out.

There is no evil in this man, no matter what his family (and oh my Go- goodness, his family means GOD and ANGELS, but she sets that entire existential revelation aside to deal with later) may have tried to pound into his head. No matter what religious books written by that family said about him. All the evidence she has, everything she knows about him says that he. is. a. good. man.

And she knows what she says next could break him. Or it could cement just how she’s come to realize she feels about him. How, she realizes now, she came here tonight to tell him she feels.

* * *

His eyes are closed, Lucifer mentally bracing himself for her horrified screams and the sound of Chloe running from him, running to the elevator, running out of his life. He opens his eyes after a few minutes of hearing nothing but his own and Chloe’s breathing. He fears she may be frozen like Dr. Linda had been upon first seeing the truth.

She’s right in front of him. Instead of fear in her eyes, he sees instead something he never would have expected. He sees awe. Awe and calculation - as though under the instinctive shock of discovery, her sharp detective’s brain is still working, neatly slotting together a thousand puzzle pieces she hadn’t even realized she possessed until that moment.

“Detective…?”

“It’s all real,” Chleo breathes softly. “Lucifer, I… I am so sorry I never believed you before. This whole time, you were always telling me the truth.”

Lucifer can’t stop staring at her in bewilderment, in shock, and increasingly in hope. “You’re still here?” He seems to be stuck on this, her apology not even registering.

Chloe’s eyebrows climb up her forehead. “I’m still here. Why wouldn’t I be? You’re my partner. My best friend.”

“A monster.” His wings droop as his own self-loathing kicks back in, overriding his wonder at her continued presence in his life - for now, at least. _She’ll run as soon as she understands_, he thinks.

“A monst.. Lucifer, no.” Chloe closes the distance between them, reaching for his hands. “You could never be a monster to me.”

“Even now that you know I’m ‘evil incarnate’? Satan? The Devil?” She can see how the words hurt him even as he speaks each epithet. She reaches one hand up to cup his cheek.

“You are still the Lucifer I know. The same Lucifer who… who steals snacks from the vending machine at the precinct, who makes completely inappropriate jokes at crime scenes. Who has to make a pit stop for a clothing change if your shirt gets crumbs on it from the cool ranch puffs you’re addicted to — not that that ever seems to happen, somehow. The crumbs, I mean, not the costume change.” She can’t help but smile at him a little as the softest of laughs crinkles her eyes. “The same Lucifer who…” she trails off for a second, puzzle pieces still slotting into place. “You’re the same Lucifer who saved my life. More than once, I think? How could I ever be afraid of you? You’re still my best friend…. You’re still _my_ Lucifer.”

His free hand is suddenly in her hair, trembling but insistent, tilting her head up for half a second before his lips are on hers and she’s kissing him back and oh—

He slows the kiss and pulls back from her. Only enough to speak. When he does, his voice shakes a little. “Detective… Chloe.” Oh, and doesn’t she just melt at hearing her name tumble from his lips? “I am and will always be your Lucifer.”

He leans back in to kiss her and she lets him. Her hands drift from his cheek to his hair, from his hand to his hip, and she never wants this to end. And yet.

Chloe pulls back to study his face. She can smell the whiskey on him.  
  
“Lucifer.. You’re drunk. We should stop.”

“No, darling.” A smile blossoms across his face. “I am quite possibly the soberest I’ve been in years, right at this moment.”

“You’re sure you’re not drunk?” She glances at the whiskey tumbler and back at him, a need pushing its way through her.

“I may be able to _get_ drunk whilst you’re near me, darling, but… well. Angelic metabolism _is_ still a pesky annoyance.”

“Good.” She reaches for his shirt buttons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, yes I was raised on Star Trek. Why do you ask? ;)


End file.
